Borderlands

Borderlands history emphasizes the longer histories of peoples and places where national and imperial boundaries are drawn and re-drawn. Current social, political, and economic transformations (and technological advances) have forced people across the globe to grapple with projects that cut across nation-state configurations. At The University of Texas at Austin, scholars of Borderlands history have been wrestling with ways to incorporate the importance of place to the movement of goods, people and ideas for the last century.

Earlier generations of scholars at the university led the way in creating the field of Borderlands history. Americo Paredes, Eugene Bolton, Carlos Castaneda and Walter Prescott Webb crossed national boundaries to research and narrate the ongoing struggles of Mexicans in Texas, the creation of Texas, and the shifting environmental and cultural make-up of the Great Plains.

Eugene Bolton initiated the study of the Spanish Borderlands as a separate field of inquiry here in Austin. Building on, and moving beyond, Walter Prescott Webb's pioneering history of the Great Plains, George I. Sanchez's emphasis on the effects of the built environment on migrant school children, and William Goetzmann's intellectual history of Western landscapes, the faculty currently emphasize the complex factors that link cultures, nations, environments, peoples, and places together.

The multi-dimensional character of Borderlands history emerges from faculty working on Colonial America, American Indians, Latin America, Mexican American Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Modern European, American, and Asian history.

Borderlands faculty list